President of New England Americans for Lebanon (NEL)
Boston, Massachusetts. USA
April ‎‏10‏‎, ‎‏2005‏

Gone are the shabby checkpoints and the haggard Syrian soldiers manning them. Gone are the ‎green arches made from pine and palm trees downed to raise the portraits of the Assad ‎dynasty: from Hafez to Basel and Bashar. Gone are the statues of the dictators erected “in your ‎face” of the Lebanese people, for nowhere at their checkpoints or the office buildings they ‎confiscated or the dungeons they ran did Syria's men – over thirty years in their host country – ‎have the decency to raise a Lebanese flag next to the Syrian flag. What more did the Lebanese ‎people need to understand that Syria was in Lebanon not to liberate, protect or defend, but only ‎to subdue, erase, and eliminate by repression and oppression?‎

Gone are the drab green Soviet-vintage trucks. Gone are the civilian-dressed Mukhabaraat men ‎lounging at Beirut Airport and casually checking their registers for the names of the “wanted” ‎Lebanese who dared a homecoming. Gone are the cars with shaded windows, the vulgar and ‎sadistic killers, murderers, kidnappers, hoodlums, vengeful men who hated Lebanon and its ‎people to the bone. Gone are all these men who were trucked in from remote desert villages of ‎the Syrian interior, after being brainwashed to hate Lebanon as a renegade and decadent ‎province that needed to be “re-educated” into the fold of true Arabism. A strayed province of a ‎once glorious Arab Syria that, truth be told, never really existed except inside the ‎megalomaniacal minds of the Baathist criminals whose only source of pride in this world in ‎which they utterly failed is their delusional nostalgia for a antiquated fantasy. For the Syrian ‎reality remains a terribly miserable one, and the only escape from the Syrian Gulag is to feed off ‎the illusions of a past that has been mythified and exaggerated in logarithmic proportion to the ‎misery of ‎‏20‏th century Syria. They are all finally going home, to that land beyond the green ‎Lebanon mountain range and the barren hills of the Anti-Lebanon range where the Syrian desert ‎begins. ‎

To those of my generation, however, the departure of the Syrian men from Lebanon will never ‎erase the pain, the fear and the hurt of three decades. From the jewel of the Middle East, ‎resplendent in the glimmer of its joie-de-vivre by the Mediterranean, where East met West ‎around every street corner and in the myriad of cafes and restaurants, clubs and theaters, ‎beaches and mountain retreats, Lebanon was brought down like a calf to the slaughter by the ‎Arabs – every one of them, the Palestinians, the Saudis and the Kuwaitis, the Libyans and the ‎Egyptians, the Somalis and the Sudanese, and most of all the Syrians – because it stood as a ‎thorn in the side of the totalitarian drab of the Arab World. Lebanon violated every taboo and ‎every norm of that Arab World. It had Christians, Druze, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Armenians, ‎Shiites who intermarried and lived as equals side by side next to Sunnis. Worse yet, it had ‎Westerners living with all those people – not in walled compounds – but anywhere they wished. ‎It had church bells that tolled next to the Muezzin at the mosque. It had mini-skirts in the ‎streets and bikinis on the beaches. It had Arak-drinking Zajal poets dueling with words on ‎television. It had a free press that poked fun at kings and queens, presidents, sultans and Emirs ‎alike, often with the pens of the same Arab writers and intellectuals who had escaped from their ‎home countries to the refuge of Lebanon. ‎

This was too much decadence and diversity to handle for the pan-Arab Baathist nationalists who ‎preferred homogenized compliant societies to diverse and rebellious free people. Lebanon had ‎too many colors. It had Arab, French, American and Lebanese universities. It had a British High ‎School, an American International College, a secular Lyçée Français and a religious French Jesuit ‎school, and German, Italian and other schools, all coexisting next to a plethora of Lebanese ‎private religious and secular schools, as well as a full-fledged Lebanese public school system. It ‎had veiled women who watched streakers cross Hamra Street in the early ‎‏1970‏s. It had a red ‎light district where wealthy Arabs – from the kingdoms and emirates of the Gulf – mingled with ‎equally drunken sailors from around the world to defuse their repressed libidos. In the words of ‎a young Kuwaiti student I met once at Brown University, when Saddam occupied and was ‎brutalizing Kuwait, as I tried to compare his Kuwait under Saddam to my Lebanon under Hafez, ‎‎“We went to Lebanon to f--- your sisters and your mothers...You deserve to be occupied by ‎Syria, but we do not deserve to be occupied by Iraq”. Such was the gratitude of the Arabs for a ‎country that they claimed as one of them, often against its own wishes, a country to which they ‎escaped from the boredom and repression of their own countries, and then only to turn around ‎and spit at it in hatred. ‎

And so, thirty years ago, as Lebanon was moving forward into the modern world by keeping its ‎doors open to the world, money, mercenaries, and weapons began flowing in from Egypt, Libya, ‎Syria and elsewhere in the Arab World. A rabid Arab media turned against small Lebanon ‎because it dared to say no to Arafat and his PLO. Never mind that the Palestinians had been ‎muzzled, massacred, and locked up in their camps in every other Arab country, and all the Arab ‎rulers wanted was to contain the Palestinians inside Lebanon for fear of a revolution at home. ‎And never mind that the Palestinian Cause was merely a commodity in the market of Arab ‎principles for the dictators to maintain their grip on power and their boots over their people. ‎

Maggie Abou-Jaoudeh's death in the Spring of ‎‏1976‏‎ epitomizes what the Arabs did to Lebanon. I ‎personally witnessed this one of many untold atrocities during the so-called “civil” war between ‎the Syro-Palestinians and the Lebanese people, when the war moved from the streets of Beirut ‎along the fortified PLO camps to the Mountain. Maggie was a ‎‏5‏‎-year old with curly blond hair ‎who was killed by a single shell fired by the Syrian paramilitary Al-Saika organization from the ‎other side of the mountain facing Broumana on a glorious Spring day of ‎‏1976‏‎. A single shell. Not ‎a volley. Not a battle. Not an artillery exchange. Just one mortar shell. There had been no ‎clashes for weeks, and Spring on the hills was erasing the memory of the misery of that cold ‎winter we spent in Ghabey near Broumana as refugees from Beirut. It was not hot enough yet ‎for the cycads to begin their daytime rap on the trunks of the pine trees, but the air was light ‎and sweet. The war had followed us from Beirut, and the Battle of the Mountain was underway. ‎But we were enjoying a lull in the fighting. The children of Ghabey, a small village down the road ‎from Broumana going south towards Salima and Qornayel, were playing in the village square up ‎the hill from our house, and I could hear them from my room as I lay on my bed reading. My ‎mother was having coffee with Sayydeh, Maggie's mother, in the living room. The voices of the ‎children filled the village.‎

Then, there was a thud. One mortar thud in the distance. The echo quickly reverberated across ‎the valley beneath the Knaisseh peak and I knew the mortar was launched from the other side, ‎as we had grown accustomed to instinctively listen and gauge the origin and direction of shells. ‎It took several seconds for the shell to fly overhead, with the nervous roar of its tail vrrrooming ‎over the house. And it took us a split second to realize that the shell was going to strike near us. ‎And then the blast. Fifty yards from the house, up the hill in the middle of the village square ‎where the children were playing. The children's voices went silent, like a school of sparrows on a ‎tree when their singing frenzy is disturbed. From the living room, Sayydeh's scream rose in a ‎fast crescendo, the primal scream of a mother's heart who knew her child had been ‎harmed...MAAAAGGGIIIEE.... and my hair stood on my neck before I could jump out of the bed. ‎We all ran up the hill. Everyone was converging on the square. Maggie's sisters were there. I ‎was one of the first people on the scene...The crater, and the little grey bodies melded with the ‎blackened rubble and pavement...the colors of their clothes muted...mixed into the monotone ‎shade of burned explosives and ravaged asphalt...motionless...just lying there...I don't recall ‎seeing the faces...just these still little bodies...like Guernica's children, about whom the song ‎says, “and God filled their bullet holes with candy”... A single shell fired by the heroes of the ‎Arab Cause on the children of Ghabey on a Spring afternoon...for no other reason but to kill the ‎children...for no other reason but to inflict deep pain...For the road to Palestine and the Golan ‎and all the lost Arab causes, as Syria still wants the world to believe even today, had to go ‎through every Lebanese village, all the way from Beit Mellat in the north, through Damour and ‎on to the Shebaa Farms in the south, and over the dead bodies of Lebanon's children. The death ‎of Maggie and the children of Ghabey sums up the agony of Lebanon at the hands of the Arabs. ‎Wanton and barbaric, driven by hatred, jealousy and the frustration at Arab impotence. And so ‎they chose Lebanon as the substitute enemy because on the scale of their racist view of the ‎world, Lebanon ranks pretty high in the degree of its “otherness”. Lebanon was the proxy ‎‎“Crusader”, the isolationist, the Arab who does not want to be an Arab, the renegade, the whore ‎who went astray. ‎

What purpose, I ask today, as we near the thirtieth anniversary of the start of the Lebanese War ‎in April ‎‏13‏‎, ‎‏1975‏‎, has the Lebanese War served the Arabs and the Palestinian Cause? How can ‎anyone find a shred of credibility in Hezbollah's claims to resistance and liberation when that ‎organization's objective has been, and still is, to fight a war that the majority of the Palestinians ‎themselves abandoned more than ‎‏13‏‎ years ago in Oslo and Madrid? I say to Hezbollah, Palestine ‎belongs to the Palestinians, and the Lebanese should no longer die for Palestine. Like Jordan, ‎the Lebanese people have chosen a “Lebanon first” policy. The Lebanese of the South have been ‎led like sheep to the slaughter, first by the PLO between ‎‏1970‏‎ and ‎‏1982‏‎ and, after the PLO was ‎evicted from Lebanon in ‎‏1982‏‎, by Hezbollah which was created, armed and financed by Syria and ‎Iran specifically to replace the PLO as the instrument of destabilization in the hands of the Assad ‎regime. Hezbollah has never served Lebanon. It has served Iran and Syria, and like these two ‎countries, Hezbollah has spilled Lebanese blood for the sake of other causes except the cause of ‎Lebanon. And to disguise its objectives, Hezbollah has assumed the cloak of a social welfare ‎organization after hijacking those functions from the Lebanese State to whom it continues to ‎deny access to the land of the Lebanese south. The Lebanese people have to wake up to the ‎truth and understand the Big Lie and the sham liberation ideology of Hezbollah that has been ‎shoved down their throats for close to two decades. Why, I ask Hezbollah, isn't there a Syrian ‎Hezbollah fighting the Israeli occupation – worse, the annexation – of the Syrian Golan Heights?‎

And now, as another April ‎‏13‏‎, ‎‏2005‏‎ comes to remind us of when, thirty years ago, that “Civil ‎War” between the Lebanese and the Palestinians broke out, now that Lebanon is ending that era ‎of its history, I will never forget Maggie and the children of Ghabey, and will remind myself that ‎their death, in its inhumanity, was also the death of my country. If Lebanon is becoming alive ‎again, it is because all the children of Lebanon who were made to die for many years, like ‎Maggie and the children of Ghabey, have finally decided to come out and play on all the village ‎squares of Lebanon, including that big square in downtown Beirut. They no longer fear that their ‎voices will ever again be silenced by the shells of hatred or the drab totalitarian regimes of the ‎Arab World.‎